Obamacare isn't the first ObamaClunker-Our Cash For Obama's Clunkers

Our Cash For Obama's Clunkers - Forbes:

Obama’s Cash for Clunkers trade-in program was a perfect example.  In yet another of his failed promises, President Obama told us that the Car Allowance Rebate System (yes – “CARS”) – the formal name of Cash for Clunkers – would create 70,000 jobs!  That’s right, if you didn’t like your car, you didn’t have to keep it – and in the process we all would be better off.

Even though Obama took $2.85 billion of our cash, according to Brookings, only a paltry 3,676 new jobs were created – at a staggering cost of $1.4 million per job.  Those are clunker-like results by any standard.  Of course, that failure was dwarfed by the Stimulus Bill at nearly a trillion dollars and Obama’s Solyndranomic energy programs that have done just as poorly at astronomically higher price tags.

All of this, of course, was very predictable.  In 1946, Henry Hazlitt, in his tour de force Economics in One Lesson, summarized the questions we face today:

“There is no more persistent and influential faith in the world today than the faith in government spending.  Everywhere government spending is presented as a panacea for all economic ills.  Is private industry partially stagnant?  We can fix it all by government spending.  Is there unemployment?  That is obviously due to ‘insufficient private purchasing power.’ The remedy is just as obvious.  All that is necessary is for government to spend enough to make up the deficiency.”

The problem with that thinking, Hazlitt points out, is that “for every public job created . . . a private job has been destroyed somewhere else . . . All that has happened, at best, is that there has been a diversion of jobs . . . More bridge builders, fewer automobile workers, televisions technicians, clothing workers, farmers.”

Government spending, you see, is at best a net-zero proposition.  To fill up your bucket, government has to empty the buckets of others.  But it is actually worse than that.

There is also the problem of how government wastes our cash.  We must always keep in mind what Milton Friedman told us: “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as wisely as he spends his own.”  The Obama experience has confirmed once again that government wastes like no other.